WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Different Center Holds in Germany A new center-left emerges as the old center-right sinks.

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-different-center-holds-in-germany-11615848274?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

Germany on Sunday fired the starting pistol on this year’s marathon of local and federal elections, with regional votes in two states. The results suggest voters are tiring of political stasis as Angela Merkel’s 16-year run as chancellor nears its end.

The result is a very German shake up, since the governments in the two states that voted won’t change. The left-leaning Green party extended its 10-year hold on Baden-Württemberg with an increased vote share of 32.6% compared to 30.3% in 2016. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD) finished first in Rhineland Palatinate, although with a slightly smaller share of 35.7% from 36.2% five years ago.

The shock is the poor performance of the second-place finisher in each race, Mrs. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). The party’s share of the vote sank to postwar lows in both states—24.1% in Baden-Württemberg and 27.7% in Rhineland Palatinate. This extends the CDU’s multiyear downward trend as voters grow less enamored with it each time they’re asked to pass judgment. The electoral skepticism includes their Bavarian sister party, the CSU, whose vote share fell by 10 percentage points in 2018 state elections.

This steady ebb of voter confidence is an immediate challenge for Armin Laschet, selected by CDU members in January to be their new party leader and potential candidate to replace Mrs. Merkel in national elections in the autumn. He’s too new on the job to be directly responsible for these local losses. A scandal involving pandemic procurement among some CDU politicians in Berlin didn’t help. Neither did a botched Covid-19 vaccine rollout and escalating political tensions surrounding Mrs. Merkel’s lockdowns.

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The whole of the Middle East will pay the price for Biden’s Iran appeasement policy Empowering Iran will come at the expense of not only Saudi Arabia – but at the expense of Iraqis, Lebanese, Syrians and Yemenis by Mohammed Khalid Alyahya

Posted By on March 16th, 2021

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/saudi-arabia-biden-iran-yemen-houthi-attacks-b1816509.html

Since the Biden administration’s decision to reverse the designation of Yemen’s Houthi militia as a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO) on February 12, drones and ballistic missiles have targeted Saudi Arabia 48 times.

The latest attack, on Saudi oil facilities in Ras Tanura, in Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, on Sunday, did not come from the direction of Yemen, a royal court adviser told the Wall Street Journal; declining to comment on whether the projectile was launched from Iran or from Iraq.

The removal of the Houthis from the US government’s FTO list was meant to reduce tensions, but it achieved the opposite result. At the heart of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy is a fallacy: that the region’s politics should be understood as a contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a conflict between two states that is also a sectarian struggle.

Seen from Tehran, the central contest in the region is between the American alliance system and Iran’s self-styled “resistance alliance”.

Biden’s misconception leads to a number of erroneous ideas: that the United States can play a neutral, mediating role between Riyadh and Tehran; that by distancing itself from Saudi Arabia, it creates opportunities for regional stability and understanding; and that it is the Saudi role in Yemen – and not the Iranian role – that has perpetuated the conflict in that country.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Malarkey and Malaise Jed Babbin

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://spectator.org/biden-speech-malaise/

Joe Biden’s campaign bus had a sign on it promising “No Malarkey,” but malarkey was a primary feature of his campaign. It’s not entirely correct to say that Biden’s Thursday evening speech was the equivalent of Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, but it was a pretty thick mixture of malaise and malarkey.

Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “malaise” speech was delivered almost 10 years to the day after we put a man on the moon. In those 10 years, we had gone from energy independence to dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Inflation was rampant, political unrest was almost the norm, and we hadn’t yet recovered from losing the Vietnam War. The country was at peace (five months later, Iranians seized American diplomats and held them until Ronald Reagan was inaugurated), but it was stalled, discouraged, and growing poor.

The energy crisis slowed our economy, and Carter’s speech was about why we weren’t able to solve it. He blamed it on a crisis of Americans’ confidence in solving problems. According to Carter, we had a crisis of confidence in our government, the media, ourselves, and the nation. The solutions he proposed had nothing to do with recovering our confidence and had almost no effect on the energy crisis that existed in his day.

Biden’s speech paralleled Carter’s in so many ways that it could have been written by a Carter speechwriter.

Biden began with a dose of falsehood by taking credit for what Trump had done. He bashed Trump — without mentioning his name — for letting the virus spread with months of delays, denials, and silence. That was a a Big Lie. On January 31, after the first few cases of COVID were detected in the U.S., Trump imposed a ban on anyone entering the country who had been in China in the past 14 days. (Biden denigrated that sort of travel ban as “xenophobic.”)

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Greatest Education Battle of Our Lifetimes By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-greatest-education-battle-of-our-lifetimes/

With last week’s introduction in Congress of the misleadingly named Civics Secures Democracy Act, we are headed toward an epic clash over the spread of uber-controversial pedagogies — Critical Race Theory and Action Civics — to America’s classrooms. I don’t know whether the country will wake up to the danger of this legislation before or after it passes. Sooner or later, however, the truth will out. When it does, the culture war will have merged with K–12 education-policy disputes to a degree never before seen.

Because this new legislation is a backdoor effort to impose a de facto national curriculum in the politically charged subject areas of history and civics, the battle will rage in the states, at the federal level, and between the states and the federal government as well. The Biden administration’s Education Department will almost certainly collaborate in this attempt to develop a set of national incentives, measures, and penalties that effectively force Critical Race Theory and Action Civics onto states and localities. The likelihood of education controversies moving from third-tier to first-tier issues in federal elections has never been greater.

The Republicans who have co-sponsored the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” in the Senate (John Cornyn) and the House (Tom Cole) have been hornswoggled and hogtied into backing legislation that is about as far from conservative as a bill could be. It should be said in extenuation of their decision that the bill is careful to bury its true ends under anodyne jargon. You have to know a lot about Action Civics, for example, to understand that this bill is designed to force it onto the states. Most conservatives don’t even know what Action Civics is, much less understand its misleading jargon. The very term “Action Civics” is a euphemism for political protests for course credit, something close to the opposite of a proper civics course. That’s one reason why the “Civics Secures Democracy Act” is so egregiously misnamed.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘Woke’ Science Has No Place in Government Policymaking There are two problems with public officials legitimizing “soft science” as the basis for policy making: It often fails to arrive at the right answers and it can undermine public trust. By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/woke-science-has-no-place-in-government-policymaking/

“Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon.” This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Biden’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science, in fact, is the scientific method—posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions. 

Dr. Nelson’s assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps we should not be too surprised by a “squishy” statement from someone whose undergraduate degree was in sociology, while her doctorate is in “American Studies.” What, we wonder, qualifies her to be deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy? And how does it comport with President Biden’s commitment to always rely on “science and truth.” We suspect it is an example of how lip service to science has invaded the domain of real science. 

“Hard” sciences are a framework for understanding physical, chemical, subatomic, biological, and other natural or even man-made phenomena. The disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and especially mathematics, have nothing to do with society as such, because the phenomena they characterize exist independently of humans. Mathematics is typically the language of this framework, whether it is arcane calculus, probability theory, combinatorics, topology, or some other branch well understood by only a very select group. 

The presence of uncertainty or unresolved questions in the hard sciences does not make them soft or diminish their rigor. In fact, scientific findings incorporate statistical uncertainty, but without ascribing motives or a social context. 

As an example of the evolution of science, Newton’s laws of physics were once believed to be immutable. Centuries later, Einstein hypothesized mathematical principles that questioned the validity of certain of Newton’s laws in extreme conditions—seminal speculations that were unusual and daring but amenable to the process of hypothesis and experimentation. In fact, subsequent experiments—the essence of science—have validated most of Einstein’s theories. In other situations, the process is reversed: an experiment produces new or unexpected results, spawning theories to explain them, which then require further testing to validate or disprove them. This is how science works. 

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate change and cancel culture – here’s how left uses fear to push costly, radical policies Yes, climate change is a real problem. However, it is typically vastly exaggerated

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/climate-change-fear-guilt-panic-policies-bjorn-lomborg

Across the world, politicians are now promising climate policies costing tens of trillions of dollars – money we don’t have and resources that are desperately needed elsewhere.

Yet, climate campaigners tell us, if we don’t spend everything on climate now, nothing else matters, because climate change threatens our very civilization. As President Biden says: climate change is “an existential threat”.

Yes, climate change is a real problem. However, it is typically vastly exaggerated, and the resulting alarmism is exploited to justify the wasteful spending of trillions.

Pointing this out will get you canceled. I should know, because I have personally been on the receiving end of this climate alarmism enforcement for years. I was recently scheduled to give a public lecture at Duke University when a group of climate-politicized professors – some who write for the UN Climate Panel – publicly asked Duke to cancel my appearance.

One of my presentation points was highlighting the latest full U.N. Climate Panel report that estimates the total cost of climate change. They found that unmitigated climate change in half a century will reduce general welfare equivalent to lowering each person’s income by between 0.2 and 2%.

Given that the U.N. expects each person on the planet to be much better off – 363% as wealthy as today – climate might cause us to only be 356% as rich by then. That is a problem, but certainly not the end of the world.

Why don’t most people know this? Because stories of catastrophe and human guilt garner more clicks and are better for weaponizing political arguments. Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to make good decisions if we’re panicked. 

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Open Borders: An Assault on Common Sense By Frank Miele

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/03/15/open_borders_an_assault_on_common_sense_145399.html

“Instead of Trump’s “America First” policy, we now have a federal government that intends to take responsibility for the “hopes and dreams” of foreign nationals. Not just that, but to do so while undermining Americans.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

So begins one of the most pivotal pronouncements in the advancement of human liberty. With those words, Thomas Jefferson threw down a gauntlet at the feet of not just the king of England, but also at Parliament and the entire entrenched elite who, up until then, had reserved power unto themselves by dint of their education, upbringing and wealth.

No more, Jefferson insisted. By declaring the truths of equality and of unalienable rights to be “self-evident,” Jefferson freed the common people from the yoke of oppression they had too long labored under — including the oppression of being told what to think by their “betters.”

This, in sum, is the genius of American democracy, that it was based on “Common Sense,” not just the pamphlet by Thomas Paine but the very concept itself. The American people had discovered that they were well enough equipped by their Creator to take on any task, meet any challenge, confront any oppressor. They could think for themselves. That was the key.

Because Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers gave voice to this revolutionary idea, they were granted authority by the people to conduct a Revolutionary War, deriving (as the Declaration of Independence would have it) their powers “from the consent of the governed.”

It is that same consent which has been the foundation of our democracy for the past 245 years, but it must not be taken for granted. Jefferson posited that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Legends of Our Fall The left-wing postmodern idea of “truth” as a mere pick-and-choose official narrative is now normal. Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-legends-of-our-fall/

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. ”
— Carleton Young in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”

Many politicians at one point or another live by lies—if they can get away with them. 

Our supposed sentinels, the media—self-defined as independent, cynical, and skeptical journalists—are supposed to separate political fictions from truth.  

Legends As Facts 

Of course, sometimes they used to do that—if only selectively. There were Communist sympathizers in the Roosevelt Administration and holdovers in the 1950s deep state. But the Red Peril was not always what the demagogic Joe McCarthy claimed when shaking his lengthy, indiscriminate “lists” of “commie” names and crimes.  

Once U.S. Army counsel Joseph Welch, Edward R. Murrow, and assorted journalists began to demand proof of all of McCarthy’s charges, his public following dissipated.  

The George W. Bush Administration in its case to remove Saddam Hussein unwisely ignored all the 23 bipartisan writs authorizing the use of the force by the Congress. Instead, it rhetorically bundled all congressional authorizations into one case against Saddam Hussein: the existential threat of huge Iraqi stockpiles of deliverable “weapons of mass destruction.”  

After Saddam’s removal, U.S. forces did not find depots of poisonous and nerve gases. Whether they were nonexistent, or moved stealthily to border dictatorships like Syria or even Iran, or were destroyed no one knew. The public only remembered the government assurance that WMDs, the popular justification for the preemptive invasion, would be there upon U.S. arrival—a narrative that the media originally did not question and then later swore that it always had been skeptical as it led the cheer: “Bush lied, people died.”

 Noble Lies

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Wussification Of The West If we’re banning Dr. Seuss books for “racialized” content, shouldn’t we next expect to ban Shakespeare because of Othello and Shylock? By Ilana Mercer

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/14/the-wussification-of-the-west/

The Dr. Seuss book-burning gave a guest on Tucker Carlson’s eponymous show the giggles: “It’s total distraction from the real issues,” claimed one Chadwick Moore. So wrong. 

Come to think of it, our much-loved TV host’s defense of the purged Dr. Seuss books fell short of freedom’s standards: “Dr. Seuss was not a racist” was the gist of it. 

But before deconstructing Tucker’s defeatist and defensive argument—here is the latest in the saga of Dr. Seuss and the wussification of the West, for lack of a better word. 

The New York Times reports that, “Six Dr. Seuss books will no longer be published because of their use of offensive imagery.” 

None other than Dr. Seuss Enterprises, “the business that oversees the estate of the children’s author and illustrator,” “had decided last year to end publication and licensing of” the following titles: 

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street 
If I Ran the Zoo 
McElligot’s Pool
On Beyond Zebra!
Scrambled Eggs Super!
The Cat’s Quizzer

MEDIA Comments turned off

No, you’re not imagining the media’s Pravda-ization By Andrea Widburg

Posted By on March 15th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/no_youre_not_imagining_the_medias_pravdaization.html

Matt Taibbi is that rare breed – an honest leftist journalist. And make no mistake about his leftism, for this is a man who thinks Noam Chomsky is a great thinker. Despite that serious ideological confusion on his part, Taibbi understands something profoundly important in American politics; namely, that our media has become completely corrupt, and more closely represents the media in Soviet Russia than the media in a free country with a First Amendment. If you haven’t yet, you must read his article, “The Sovietization of the American Press.”

Taibbi, who has collected examples of Soviet newspapers over the years so he knows whereof he speaks, says that, in 2021, there is nothing to distinguish the American media from the Soviet press. The important point he makes about the Soviet media is that its world was divided into heroes and enemies. The governing Communist Party was heroic and anything or anybody that challenged it was part of a vast, evil conspiracy aimed at destroying this heroic party.

After giving examples of the fatuous superlatives that the Soviet media heaped on communist politicians and their actions, Taibbi points out that there is little difference between those words and what we see in today’s reporting now that Biden is in office: